Whose voice do you listen to?

John 10:22-30

22 At that time the Festival of the Dedication took place in Jerusalem. It was winter, 23 and Jesus was walking in the temple, in the portico of Solomon. 24 So the Jews gathered around him and said to him, “How long will you keep us in suspense? If you are the Messiah, tell us plainly.” 25 Jesus answered, “I have told you, and you do not believe. The works that I do in my Father’s name testify to me, 26 but you do not believe because you do not belong to my sheep. 27 My sheep hear my voice. I know them, and they follow me. 28 I give them eternal life, and they will never perish. No one will snatch them out of my hand. 29 My Father, in regard to what he has given me, is greater than all, and no one can snatch them out of the Father’s hand. 30 The Father and I are one.”

Whose voice do you listen to?  Who leads you?  Whom do you follow?  

It’s more difficult to answer these kinds of questions than you might think at first.  On the one hand, there’s perhaps no more pervasive message in our culture than the one about how you shouldn’t listen to other people but follow your own heart, reject who others say you should be and instead be true to yourself.  Freedom, authenticity, self-actualization require shutting out the other voices and listening only to your own.  

On the other hand, there is nothing more emblematic of our cultural moment than the influencer.  It will not come as a surprise to you that I do not regard the rise of the influencer as a positive development.   Rather than indulging in a few minutes of bemoaning the performative vapidity of influencers, consider why it is that influencers enjoy the audience they do.  Surely no one flicks through the images on screen and thinks to themselves, “I desire to be influenced; please influence me”.  I suspect most folks assume they’re not the true audience for the content even as they’re also the sort of people who consume lots of it.  We might tell ourselves this is just mindless entertainment, but it is rooted in our own dissatisfaction and anxiety, a desire to find a voice to listen to, a leader whom we can follow to a better life.  

We all still very much want an authority in our lives, and influencers step in to provide a kind of personalized, bespoke authority that simultaneously seems to allow us to be true to ourselves even as we flail about trying to discover something to be true to.  You cannot be true to yourself when you don’t know who you are, when you don’t have a self worth being true to. 

So again: Whose voice do you listen to?  Who leads you?  Whom do you follow?   

We have been taught to listen only to our own voice even as it leads us deeper into the abyss.  You can probably already detect where this is going, but it’s worth mentioning that even amongst Christians who ostensibly submit to the lordship of Christ, this same cultural imperative remains very much in force.   It’s quite typical to understand one’s faith as process of sifting amongst the resources of Christianity and assembling the pieces in a way that seems to meet our needs.  We are not people inclined to subject ourselves to any authority; we reserve the right to decide which parts to accept and which to reject.  We still get to be in charge.   

One of the difficulties that arises when we wrestle with the New Testament - and the Gospel of John, especially - is that it presents Christian life as starkly different than non-Christian life, as walking in the light instead of darkness, as being saved rather than lost, as possessing the truth rather than possessed by lies.  And so on.  In the case of John, the prevailing interpretation is that this contrast owes to the reality that, upon becoming Christians, the community out of which the Gospel arose experienced harsh persecution by their former family and neighbors.  The division between church and synagogue grew sharp, as each asserted more vociferously that they were true and their opponents false.  Our passage accuses the Jews of not believing because they cannot see or accept Jesus’ mighty deeds, and thus they are made outsiders, whereas the believers are the sheep in his flock, the faithful ones who listen to the shepherd’s voice. 

It’s natural for embattled communities to create in-group cohesion and to prevent defections by imposing absolute distinctions between themselves and outsiders.  But in times and places like our own in which being a Christian does not entail such social consequences and when we move through world more or less like everyone else does, the attempt to map this Scriptural language onto our lived experience can seem artificial, even distorting.  One common response to this tension is to exaggerate the extent to which the world rejects Christians so that these sharp lines in the Bible start to seem more visible in reality.  The sheepfold becomes more of a fort to keep the world out than a refuge to keep the sheep in.  While it’s true that the world is more hostile to belief than it was a generation or two ago, the real challenge for us is not the persecution we face but, quite the opposite, that our lives look more or less indistinguishable from anyone else.  The Bible tells us that we are sheep and they are goats, but who can actually tell the difference?  

There may yet come a day when the relationship between Christians and their neighbors will again resemble that of the NT and we will again find that Scripture speaks directly to our situation.  We shouldn’t hope for the day when Christians again find ourselves persecuted, when our convictions place outside of polite company, but then maybe we shouldn’t reflexively resist it either.  Being told you’re an outsider is perhaps the most powerful driver of identity.  .  

In the meantime, there’s another way of reading this sheep and shepherd language that might better fit our current situation.  Scripture also tells us, as we were reminded on Good Friday, that “all we like sheep have gone astray, we have turned to our own way”.  Apparently sheep are remarkably unintelligent animals; they tend to wander away and put themselves in danger, and they’re more or less incapable of finding their way back unless someone seeks them out and leads them back to safety.  They must listen to the voice of the shepherd and follow in order to live.  

So rather than the message we hear at church being that, We’re the faithful ones who listen to the shepherd’s voice (which makes us better than everyone else), we ought instead to emphasize that, if we are indeed sheep, this names our predilection to find ourselves in places we ought not to go, our incapacity to recognize what is in our own best-interest, our desperate need for someone else to lead us to a better life.   To be a Christian is to declare that Jesus is the good shepherd whose voice you - and all the sheep - ought to be listening to, that following him is the way to truly abundant life -  but this does not mean that we, in fact, do listen to Jesus, for we seem to be as prone to wander as anyone.   

So: Whose voice do you listen to?  Who leads you?  Whom do you follow?  

The truth is that all of us hear lots of voices and are influenced in ways that we are not aware of.  Rarely does someone say, “I really feel myself being influenced right now.”   One thesis embedded in this community is that change, even transformation, happens without us being aware that it’s happening.  It is more passive reception than active decision.  We became who we are through enculturation, without really trying to be those people.  The goal of worship is to be actively countercultural, to reorient our lives toward God, to make Christ the light in which we live and move and our being.  Our liturgy seeks to counteract the cultural liturgies we engage in every day, all the voices calling us to worship ourselves.  

Basically we live in an environment where the voice of the good shepherd must compete with other voices.  And perhaps one practical thing we can do is not just try harder to listen to Jesus but actually to silence the voices to which we are subjected.  Most of us have been conditioned to fill silence with noise, to ward of boredom with shallow entertainment, to convince ourselves that compulsively checking the news somehow makes us better people.  Not only do these habits crowd out Jesus’ voice, we passively absorb a way of seeing the world that leads us astray.  

We know that these habits don’t bring us life, and yet we are like dumb sheep who can’t find their way out.   And though, given that we are here in church, you would think we’re the people trying to listen Jesus’ voice and follow him, we too find it hard to hear him or, when we do, we’re not convinced that following him is necessarily better than following something else.  And this points to another thesis of our community: that you cannot really know that Jesus is worth following until you actually follow him.  If we find ourselves not entirely satisfied with or convinced by Christian life, we might ask ourselves if Jesus’ voice is the one we listen to, if he’s the one who leads us, the one we follow.